Understanding The Power of WHY to Dig Deeper into The WHAT From Transactional Data (#738)

Brandon: Imagine a pyramid of income.

Brandon: You’ve got about 43 million outside Africans right now.

Brandon: Of those 43 million South Africans, about 70% live in households earning less than 10,000 round-a-month, so less than $500, $600 a month.

Brandon: It’s a very stressed part of the economy.

Brandon: This is where the 43% unemployment comes from.

Brandon: About 55% of those 30 million adults rely completely on social grants from the government to put food on the table.

Brandon: Our job is to try and understand consumer behavior.

Brandon: There’s a lot of…

Brandon: You can find out what in many ways.

Brandon: Finding out why is the question that always fascinates me.

Brandon: My favorite loyalty moment in my life is the bar up the road.

Brandon: It’s my local sort of pub that I do a lot of meetings at, business meetings, of course.

Brandon: And every time they put a new beer on a draft, when I walk in, they’ll give me a draft and go, hey, what do you think of it?

Paula: Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Paula: Today’s episode is hosted by Amanda Cromhout, the founder of TruthLoyalty, an international loyalty consultancy.

Paula: She’s also the author of the book, Blind Loyalty, 101 Loyalty Concepts Radically Simplified, and the founder of the Blind Loyalty Trust.

Paula: Enjoy.

Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout, the CEO of Truth and the author of Blind Loyalty.

Amanda: Today’s interview on Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV is with Brandon de Kock.

Amanda: He is the Director of Storytelling of Whyfive Insights.

Amanda: He is also the recipient of the South African Loyalty Awards annual recognition of industry personality of the year with his late business partner, Stuart Lowe.

Amanda: BrandMapp is the study which partners with Truth for the Truth and BrandMapp South Africa Loyalty White Paper, which is the annual go-to loyalty read for the South African market.

Amanda: I work with Brandon frequently and intensely to produce the loyalty white paper that serves the South African market.

Amanda: The data he uses represents 85 percent of consumer spend in South Africa.

Amanda: It’s a very robust study and he talks us through the insights that generates great storytelling around the loyalty industry, not only here in South Africa but globally.

Amanda: He discusses the power of research to answer very meaningful questions of why consumers behave in certain ways whilst obviously we rely every day on transactional data that tells us what consumers are doing.

Amanda: Join me as we unpack the South Africa loyalty landscape but really from a lens of someone who understands the power of why consumer behavior is what it is.

Amanda: Sometimes the interviews are really, really something I look forward to.

Amanda: And today’s interview on Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty is just one of those.

Amanda: I’m proud to bring to the world of loyalty, Brandon de Kock, who’s a very good friend of mine, but he is also the director of storytelling for Whyfive Insights.

Amanda: Brandon, welcome to Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Brandon: How’s it Amanda?

Brandon: Thank you and good morning.

Brandon: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Amanda: So the reason we want to talk to you on this global loyalty show is because you have provided, through our partnership in South Africa, incredible data that has served the whole loyalty industry.

Amanda: But not only have you done that, you’ve done so with a great level of insight into how consumers behave around the loyalty industry, loyalty programs.

Amanda: And for that reason, in 2025, the South African Loyalty Awards recognized you and your partner, your late partner in business, Stuart Lowe, as the industry personalities of the year.

Amanda: And Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty, were very much part of that recognition process.

Amanda: So for that reason, we want to chat to you because there’s so much you share with the South African audience that I know will have a global impact.

Amanda: So our first question, we’re going to kick off straight with the traditional first question of Let’s Talk Loyalty, Loyalty TV, is what is your favorite business read?

Brandon: Business read, cheapers.

Brandon: Business, I don’t do a lot of business reading.

Brandon: I mean, I guess I actually find inspiration for a lot of what we do all over the place.

Brandon: Personally, I have a lens on the world of comedy, and I think that comedy brings great insight.

Brandon: Business read, I’ll tell you, a book that’s really inspiring me, it changes the whole time, my favorite book.

Brandon: My favorite book right now is actually Gary Lawson’s Far Side Gallery Five.

Brandon: He’s not a business writer, but he might as well be.

Brandon: Gary, he was that famous cartoonist back in the 90s and 2000s.

Brandon: Yes.

Brandon: I actually have his letter bound anthology, every single one that’s ever been, every cartoon he ever did.

Brandon: In Gary Lawson’s Far Side Five, which is around 1995, only 495, there was this whole thing about a Jane Goodall cartoon that was very famous because of these two chimpanzees sitting on a tree and the woman is preening the man, and she holds up this hand, and she goes, well, well, another blonde hair.

Brandon: Suppose you’ve been doing a little bit more research with that Jane Goodall trend, and it caused a complete furor, and there was a whole story around it.

Brandon: I landed up last year, emceeing an event where I introduced Jane Goodall here in Cape Town.

Brandon: I told this whole story and I took the book, and she actually autographed it for me, so I got a big hug from her on the safe.

Brandon: Seeing as she’s recently departed this mortal coil, I think right now it’s one of my favorites.

Brandon: I love the idea of what Larsson did in taking completely bizarre animal, humanizing animals.

Brandon: I think when we start to understand people better in business, it certainly allows us to create a bit of insight.

Brandon: I’m not trying to make people laugh a lot of the time.

Brandon: I’m trying to show them that there are humorous ways of looking at things that are deeply insightful.

Brandon: Right now, I’ll go with Gary Larsson, Far Side.

Amanda: Actually, as you say, your role, which you’ve always introduced yourself as Director of Storytelling, and I’ve never seen that in my house.

Amanda: So whenever I’ve worked with you and I introduce you, I say it not because it’s your title, but because actually that’s what you do.

Amanda: You tell the story of what the business principles are or what we’re trying to achieve, especially when we weren’t there on the white paper.

Amanda: But we’ll come on to the white paper in a short while.

Amanda: So tell us a bit more about Brandon.

Amanda: I know your role currently and I know Whyfive, and we’ll get into Whyfive as well as the business.

Amanda: But tell us your career history, because I think it’s going to be extremely different from anyone else who’s been on this show.

Brandon: Your career history.

Brandon: It’s more like a compendium of games than a career.

Brandon: As you just pointed out, I’m not a researcher.

Brandon: That’s not an academic research.

Brandon: I’m not a statistician.

Brandon: My history, I’m a writer and a photographer and a storyteller.

Brandon: I’ve written a couple of books and worked with words and pictures and stories my whole life.

Brandon: So when I call myself a storyteller, I’m not jumping into a modern boardroom bingo game of narratives and things.

Brandon: I really am a storyteller by profession.

Brandon: It’s got me into a whole lot of trouble over the years, so I spent quite a lot of time in the entertainment business.

Brandon: I was 10 years in the music industry.

Brandon: Then I got into actual publishing for about another decade just over.

Brandon: Then for the last 10 years, I’ve been involved in research.

Brandon: Really, it’s about like that famous Brene Brown quote, the stories are just data with the soul.

Brandon: I firmly believe that.

Brandon: I’m much more interested in the story behind the numbers than the numbers themselves.

Brandon: I don’t think I’ve added two decimal or any decimal points to any figures for 10 years.

Brandon: The number is a number.

Brandon: The story that underpins the numbers, often far more interesting.

Brandon: In fact, I’d say almost always, unless you’re in the hardcore accounts department and you care about return on investment and stuff like that.

Brandon: But generally speaking, I find that there’s so many stories that numbers can tell you.

Brandon: Research is a perfect game.

Brandon: Effectively, I have been researching my whole life as a writer and a journalist, that’s what you do.

Brandon: But this is more formal and obviously, it’s more about the southern consumer landscape.

Amanda: Yes.

Amanda: But you’ve just said one of the coolest lines I’ve ever heard, which is stories are just data with a soul.

Amanda: That’s beautiful.

Brandon: Rene Brown’s line, not mine.

Amanda: All right.

Amanda: Okay.

Amanda: I won’t misquote it.

Amanda: Beautiful.

Amanda: But Brandon, so I think for the audience of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, it’s a show with audiences all over the globe who are particularly interested in loyalty.

Amanda: So we’re going to now turn the tables into why we’re talking on this show.

Amanda: The loyalty landscape is something that you and I work closely on for South Africa, but our white paper gets read all over the world.

Amanda: We see that because of where it’s downloaded from.

Amanda: But before we even get to the white paper, because that isn’t the purpose of today’s discussion, tell us a little bit more around the BrandMapp study, because it’s not that well known.

Amanda: It certainly isn’t necessarily well known outside of South Africa, but its magnitude in South Africa is extremely interesting.

Brandon: Thank you.

Brandon: I hope so.

Brandon: We certainly have a broad enough range of clients to give us some comfort that the last 12 years of our lives have been meaningful, or make a meaningful impact.

Brandon: We started this work, as I said, I was in publishing for a while, and Stuart Lowe, my late partner and I were, he was the managing director, I was the creative director of this publishing house.

Brandon: We published magazines that were operating at quite a high level in the economy.

Brandon: We had a getaway, which was a travel magazine, we had a car magazine, we had a golf magazine and a mountain biking magazine and a wine magazine.

Brandon: We discovered that we just couldn’t, there was no decent information available about wealthier South Africans.

Brandon: We started reader research and literally just stumbled into, I mean, BrandMapp and the survey that we do is a complete accident of reader research done 12 years ago.

Brandon: But we discovered that we could find ways of getting these guys, these wealthier South Africans who often live behind security fences to start answering questions and telling us about their lifestyle.

Brandon: That’s really the genesis of where we are.

Brandon: We’ve continued to do that.

Brandon: We’ll get into it if you want, but a key to understanding South Africa, unlike a lot of more homogenous socioeconomic landscapes in the world, is that we are the most divided country in the world.

Brandon: We have the highest Gini coefficient of any country in the world.

Brandon: That means you’ve got this extreme imbalance between rich and poor.

Brandon: We are also the 25th biggest country in the world.

Brandon: It’s not just that we have big discrepancies, we have very big groups.

Brandon: When you start talking about the group of people who can afford consumer goods in South Africa, it’s 13 million strong.

Brandon: It’s not like there’s this tiny little group of people in some of the African territories that are super wealthy, and then everyone else is in a state of stress and economic stress.

Brandon: That’s the work that we’ve been doing.

Brandon: It’s trying to understand this piece of the pie, which is a very large economic engine.

Brandon: We call it the consumer class, and that’s what we’ve been researching pretty much for 12 years.

Brandon: It was an obvious segue.

Brandon: At some point, I remember, and it literally was when we first started doing the work, we dropped in this question about loyalty programs, not even knowing much about them.

Brandon: Actually, the very beginning was actually SunLum Reality because in the publishing world, we published their magazine for them.

Brandon: We actually helped set up that program in a way, and we didn’t know what loyalty was.

Brandon: At the time, we were working with the marketing department.

Brandon: The loyalty program was absolutely seen as a marketing ploy.

Brandon: We put this little question, and I think we only had about six programs that we asked, like, do you use them?

Brandon: We got this ridiculous result.

Brandon: People were like, yeah, F&B, E-Bucks.

Brandon: We were very surprised.

Brandon: I think it was around about then that we must have met.

Brandon: As a storyteller, I was trying to work out, what is this loyalty thing?

Brandon: So it was very obvious to us at least a decade, just over a decade ago, that it was becoming a very, very big part of the marketing mix.

Brandon: And we’re effectively marketing consultants.

Brandon: That’s actually what we are.

Brandon: We’re marketing and communications consultants.

Brandon: So understanding loyalty became really important for us.

Brandon: It’s like, what is going on here?

Brandon: You know what I mean?

Brandon: What is this thing?

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: Before we move off the study, though, I’m going to interject because you and I have debates endlessly about the definition of wealth.

Amanda: So you talk about the wealthy South Africans, but to put it in context globally, we’re talking about almost a cutoff in South African terms of 10,000 household income.

Amanda: But actually, that’s 600 US dollars household income per month.

Amanda: So that’s a demographic of customers.

Amanda: Whilst you say is a smaller percentage of South Africans, what percentage of actual consumer spend does that represent?

Brandon: So okay, so that’s a much more difficult question.

Brandon: Have we got an hour?

Brandon: So effectively, the way we try to picture it as a pyramid, imagine a pyramid of income.

Brandon: And you’ve got about 43 million South Africans right now.

Brandon: Of those 43 million South Africans, about 70% live in households earning less than 10,000 round a month.

Brandon: So less than five, $600 a month.

Brandon: It’s a very stressed part of the economy.

Brandon: There’s a, this is where the 43% unemployment comes from.

Brandon: And the vast number of those people, sorry, not the vast number, about 55% of those 30 million adults rely completely on social grants from the government to put food on the table.

Brandon: So it’s a very stressed part of the economy, right?

Brandon: Then you hit this line that we call the beginning of the consumer class, which is roughly 10,000 rand a month.

Brandon: It’s an important point because you don’t pay personal tax in South Africa if you earn less than 100,000 rand a year.

Brandon: So effectively, it’s the bottom of the personal tax sort of bracket.

Brandon: And we figured that the moment you’re doing that, you may have enough disposable income, certainly as a single person, to start acting like a consumer with some choice, as opposed to consumers acting purely out of necessity and survival.

Brandon: So then you get into the top of the triangle.

Brandon: It’s about 13.5 million adults, and they’re the adults living in what we call consumer class households, so 10K or more.

Brandon: Right at the top of the pyramid, you’ve got a little group of about 3.5 million adults, about 5% of the population, who live in households earning 40,000 rand a month or more.

Brandon: So that’s back to dollars.

Brandon: I mean, it’s $2,000 a month or more.

Brandon: It’s not a massive amount in global terms.

Brandon: But in South Africa, at 40,000 rand a month as a household, you can start making some very serious choices.

Brandon: You can start investing, you can definitely get medical aid.

Brandon: There’s a whole lot of things that suddenly become part of your basket of possibilities.

Brandon: So that’s what the landscape looks like.

Brandon: There’s a lot of information about the bottom half, but it really is a survival group.

Brandon: That’s the way I try to describe it.

Brandon: That’s the great challenge that we face as a country, is how can the 30% at the top keep pulling up and creating opportunities for the 70% at the bottom.

Brandon: So when you talk about total consumer spend on an income level, that top 30% of the triangle is pulling in about 85% of all formal market income.

Brandon: So that’s 85% of spend.

Amanda: Yeah, that’s the critical thing here is, your study is studying 85% of consumer spend.

Amanda: And the reason I define that is not because you and I banter about it a lot, is because I think in non-South African terms, the rest of the world, if you say wealthy, you’re thinking about someone driving around in a Porsche and living in a penthouse.

Amanda: Whereas we’re talking about someone who can literally start paying tax.

Brandon: Yeah, exactly.

Amanda: That’s why I wanted to clarify that, so the audience understands.

Amanda: So the BrandMapp study is obviously, it’s got enormous credibility in the market.

Amanda: It’s in your 12th year, did you say?

Amanda: So our partnership in terms of the Truth and BrandMapp loyalty white paper, we’re going into our 10th year in 2026, which is very exciting.

Amanda: And I know you’re releasing the data to us fairly soon for us to like work that through for the South African market.

Amanda: So you’ve touched on why you started asking questions about loyalty.

Amanda: Tell me a little bit more about the partnership, like what it does for South Africa.

Amanda: Like, I know what it does from a truth point of view, but I’m interested from your point of view, why do you continue doing this partnership to create the annual loyalty white paper in South Africa?

Brandon: You mean a part of the fact that we just like each other as companies?

Brandon: I think I did give you the precursor to it, which is that our job is to try and understand consumer behavior.

Brandon: There’s a lot of, you can find out what in many ways, finding out why is the question that always fascinates me.

Brandon: It’s like, why are these people doing it?

Brandon: In our BrandMapp survey, we’d always asked everything from like, what sports do you play and what sports do you watch to, what TV channels do you watch?

Brandon: It’s a landscape survey.

Brandon: And I can go in there, it’s a bit like, describe it as a crime board.

Brandon: You know, you see those crime things on TV and you got somebody putting pins in the board and they’re like connecting them with string.

Brandon: So that’s what I do every day.

Brandon: I take my data and I look at these different data points and I try to go, if that’s happening, how does it affect that?

Brandon: Or, you know, what’s the possible root causes as opposed to just what the number is.

Brandon: So it’s all about connections.

Brandon: And I think when we identified loyalty as having such a big footprint, at the beginning, to be honest with you, it was very much in the top end.

Brandon: The guys who were, I think, loyalty launched in the consumer world in South Africa, very much in the airport lounge.

Brandon: You know, if you spend a million bucks and you get 10% off, it’s worth a lot of money.

Brandon: If you’ve only got 10 rand in your pocket, the relative value of the one rand, you know what I mean?

Brandon: So loyalty for us seemed to be appealing to the wealthier South Africa and then very quickly it changed and we didn’t know why.

Brandon: And I think that’s what the fascination with the work we do together is, you guys are loyalty specialists.

Brandon: You know, I don’t know anything about running a loyalty program.

Brandon: All I can tell you is the effect it has on people and I can tell you how it will change their behavior because we can see that in the data.

Brandon: So, in this case, you guys are helping us every year to try and tell the stories on a slightly deeper level.

Brandon: This is a case where I can tell you what and you can tell me why.

Brandon: And that becomes part of my, you know, my annual storytelling.

Brandon: I put it into my basket.

Brandon: So it’s been, and I think because of the radical footprint and it’s almost like the obvious difference it’s made, it makes sense to just keep doing this, to track it longitudinally.

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: So now that we understand the impacts you’re seeing in the data, that loyalty programs aren’t just this awkward little thing stuck in the corner of marketing, they’re actually having quite a big significance.

Amanda: You may not get the exposure we get in terms of the global landscape, but some of the data I’ve shared with you, that the big brands in South Africa share openly in their annual reports are things like 80 percent sales contribution through a loyalty swipe.

Amanda: The players like TFG Rewards or extra savings from the ShopRite group are saying that magnitude of sales, and they’re both gargantuan retailers.

Amanda: So this isn’t a small thing going on.

Amanda: Like as you said, you’ve seen it in your data, we see it from the brands, we hear it from the brands themselves.

Amanda: What’s your view of the South Africa loyalty landscape?

Brandon: So I think the way, mine’s a longitudinal view.

Brandon: So if I go back to the 10 years ago, and I think what was the role that this thing played, I think I remember right at the beginning, my little catchphrase was, it’s becoming a hygiene factor.

Brandon: Everyone expects it.

Brandon: You’re starting to get to the stage where if you don’t have a loyalty program, you’re somehow lesser.

Brandon: So the hygiene factor comes in.

Brandon: Then very quickly, it became a hygiene factor.

Brandon: Quite obviously, if you go to the original Hertzberg hygiene factor theory, the idea is it’s like saying, staying healthy is not going to or medicine is what you need to get you healthy.

Brandon: The hygiene factor is you will not get ill if you just keep good hygiene.

Brandon: So it very quickly became that.

Brandon: It was like, if you don’t want to go the wrong way, you need to have a loyalty program in place.

Brandon: And we slowly started to see this thing building sort of up and down in that pyramid and sideways.

Brandon: And it wasn’t just wealthy people getting airport lounge access anymore.

Brandon: Suddenly it was people buying their groceries, getting a couple of rand per shop.

Brandon: And at the end of the month, maybe you’d have 30 or 40 rand.

Brandon: And as we’ve discussed, there are a lot of people in South Africa for whom 30 bucks, you know, you can buy a tin of of 400 gram tin of Pilschitz of 26 rand 75.

Brandon: And that will feed a family of four for a day in completely good nutritional way.

Brandon: So 30 rand is quite a lot of money for some people.

Brandon: For other people, it’s a drop in the ocean.

Brandon: So we saw the whole thing just expanding and developing and actually really embracing all parts of that pyramid, which I think was the real peak of it.

Brandon: And now, I think what’s interesting is, I feel like we’re in a sort of a post-hygiene world.

Brandon: And that’s why what’s going on right now is super fascinating for me.

Brandon: Because if you look back at something like the loyalty conference that you did this year and some of the ideas that are coming out, it’s almost like now that everyone’s using loyalty, and really like a lot of people using loyalty, as you said, these things have got like 80 percent footprints in the total South African society.

Brandon: What happens next to me is a really, really interesting question because we’re quite good at innovation in South Africa.

Brandon: We always have been out of necessity and out of just an interesting shape and size to the market as we’ve discussed.

Brandon: But I think we are at a bit of an evolutionary stage.

Brandon: I think we’ve been through all of that hygiene stuff, and now we’re like, what next?

Brandon: Because we’ve maxed out.

Brandon: Now we’ve got everyone in South Africa is now expecting to save money by being part of a loyalty program.

Brandon: I’ve never been convinced that that should be the absolute driver, but yeah.

Amanda: What’s fascinating, the conversations I have with the top senior teams who run these loyalty programs.

Amanda: Let’s take two professionals I’ve spoken to frequently.

Amanda: Whether it’s the head of EBUK, so Peter Woodhatch or head of Clix ClubCard or the CMO of Clix, Dr.

Amanda: Milani Van Roy.

Amanda: Both of them have given really clear examples of how their currency is being used as a survival mechanism as well.

Amanda: As you say, the drop down from wealthy to survival.

Amanda: So Milani can see in the data that previously Clix ClubCard cash, cash back was used for treats like maybe a lipstick or a perfume or some chocolates.

Amanda: Now, it’s been used for basics like toilet roll or soap.

Amanda: Peter Woodhatch has described how we can, and both of them have been on the Let’s Talk Loyalty, Loyalty TV show and shared these stories.

Amanda: Talks about how they can see in the data how quickly the EBUKs are redeemed, every month, and then being used on essentials like, essentials and whether it’s for electricity or, it’s just there as a survival mechanism for so many.

Amanda: So for myself, I’ll use, say, my EBUKs on Take-A-Lot, and it’s such a treat to be able to buy it by Zed and then not even put my credit card in.

Amanda: It just feels like the biggest win ever.

Amanda: That real psychological dopamine hits.

Amanda: So whether you’re on the bread line or slightly above it or way above it, it’s got this enormous impact, and we’re seeing it and you’re seeing it in the data.

Brandon: I don’t know how this relates to behavior in other territories, but for me, there’s always been this really interesting difference between the intention or the intentionality behind using loyalty.

Brandon: It definitely started and remains in the top end of the market, where there’s this quite cool idea that you’re being rewarded for something that you have to be able to do anyway.

Brandon: You know what I mean?

Brandon: It’s one of the reasons why I think the fuel programs have been so incredibly successful in South Africa, because you can’t drive a car without putting petrol in it, right?

Brandon: So when you go and buy petrol at a petrol station or a gas station, you’re doing something that you have to do.

Brandon: You have to do it to drive your car, and I get rewarded for that, whether it’s in points or you know.

Brandon: So the idea of being rewarded for behavior that you have to do anyway, I think was very much a big launching pad, and it continues to have an impact.

Brandon: But that’s really at the top of the triangle.

Brandon: At the bottom, you’ve got more this idea of how can loyalty still be used to shift consumer behavior, and that’s not necessarily rewarding me for a choice that I make.

Brandon: In other words, it’s rewarding me for going to this retailer, not that retailer.

Brandon: And that’s more along the lines you’re talking about, where there’s a huge number of people in South Africa who are going to benefit from those savings that you only get if you’ve got the car.

Brandon: Even if it’s a couple of bucks here and there, there are people in South Africa who, as I said, who can really benefit from that.

Brandon: If you can walk out of a place saving enough money for two meals for the week, and we’re not talking about thousands of dollars here, we’re talking about like 30 bucks.

Brandon: Yeah.

Brandon: It’s constantly shifted, and I think that’s very much where it is right now.

Brandon: I think there are a lot of people in South Africa who definitely rely on or see it as a really meaningful way of saving a little bit of money.

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: Absolutely.

Amanda: Without question.

Amanda: Over the years, as you say, it’s a longitudinal study which I also find utterly fascinating.

Amanda: It is wonderful now going into our 10th year of the White Paper to have that history.

Amanda: Over the years, we’ve seen a change in obviously consumer behavior, obviously, and you and I talk about the term loyalty promiscuity.

Amanda: Talk me through your views about it.

Amanda: We’ve seen the active usage of number of programs explode from three to 10 over the last however many years.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s like 10 years, I think.

Brandon: I think it’s exactly that.

Brandon: I think at the beginning, it was about three, and it was probably only about 30% of the population, and now you’ve got 60% of the population using an average of between 7 and 10 programs.

Brandon: So promiscuity, obviously, it’s a term that I throw out just to be a little bit obnoxious or just to get people in the room to start listening.

Brandon: But we do have a, I think the loyalty promiscuity is a direct result of a match broader consumer promiscuity.

Brandon: So we, one of the things that defines South Africa is that we’re a more, we’re still a very mall orientated retail environment.

Brandon: The, you know, the idea of the corner shop in South Africa, it’s kind of, it’s disappeared pretty quickly, or it’s not, even if it hasn’t disappeared, it’s been swamped by mall culture.

Brandon: You know, we, I think we still, last year, I think we built almost, I think 750,000 square meters, more square meters of malls, and they continue to pop up all over the place.

Brandon: You know, if you Google new mall in South Africa, just have a look and see what the results have come up, it’s insane.

Brandon: So one of the things that that means is that even for your lower end consumer, the variety of choice is extreme.

Brandon: You know, you never just get one anchor retail client in a mall.

Brandon: There’s always two.

Brandon: So we live in an environment where even lower down in the income bands, there’s actually quite a high level of a degree of consumer choice.

Brandon: And I think that is the loyalties tying into that.

Brandon: You know, that you walk into any mall and you’ve got five different clothing stores that are all pretty similar, and you’ll literally you can use those loyalty programs to save quite a lot of money depending on where you shop.

Brandon: So it’s directly related, I think, to the general level of consumer promiscuity.

Brandon: I mean, we even, you know, we’re a multi-bank society.

Brandon: If you go through the average South African in that consumer class is a client of at least two different banks, the higher up you go, the more you get.

Brandon: So even within banking and loyalty in the banking environment, you’ll have people who are members, you know, they’ve got two different bank accounts with two different banks.

Brandon: They’ve got two different loyalty programs associated with them.

Brandon: So they’re going to be making lots of choices, especially when it comes to high spend items, and you’re getting really good rewards back on that, or literally cash back on your credit card, you’ll decide where to go.

Brandon: I had a mate who bought an Aston Martin, I have some fairly wealthy friends, proper wealthy friends in American terms, and I got a mate who bought an Aston Martin on a credit card based on the air miles that it would deliver.

Brandon: That’s the extreme version, obviously.

Brandon: But I think that consumer promiscuity in South Africa, it’s certainly, I think that’s a global thing.

Brandon: I think that as a world, we’ve all just become more promiscuous as consumers, and especially in an online return environment.

Brandon: You can get pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want to deliver to your door.

Brandon: If you go into a mall, you’ve got thousands of shops to choose from.

Brandon: Loyalty is very much just ridden that same ride, I think.

Amanda: Interestingly, I’ll always give the advice when asked on any media show around loyalty, consumer advice, like pick your lane.

Amanda: So don’t be promiscuous.

Amanda: If you’re going to use a pharmaceutical brand, health and beauty brand, choose a clicks or a disk, depending on which you prefer or your location or your fuel choice, choose engine or BP or Shell.

Amanda: But I think what we’re seeing is, A, the consumer promiscuity, but B, the fact now that every, if you look at, I call it the wheel of life.

Amanda: So your wheel of life where you’ve got grocery retailing, fashion retailing, fuel, banking, telco, and leisure, travel and so on.

Amanda: And then utilities and so forth.

Amanda: If you look at that complete wheel of how you spend your annual salary, your monthly salary, loyalty is able to touch every single one of them.

Amanda: And we’re seeing a huge trend around consolidation.

Amanda: So there’s some great programs in the market.

Amanda: They’re consolidating all of that choice and able to reward more than just one industry vertical, like grocery and so forth.

Amanda: So I think consumers need to be savvy though.

Amanda: Like you mentioned banking and like multi-banks, which I think is quite unusual for transactional banking particularly.

Amanda: So South Africans are more multi-banks, I think, than you see elsewhere in the world.

Amanda: But you actually can’t extract, and that I do know, you can’t extract maximum loyalty benefits if you’re playing in both banks.

Amanda: You really can’t.

Amanda: To get the real top-end results, you’ve got to pick your lane, so to speak.

Brandon: So I think, I mean, and this is anecdotal as opposed to necessarily data-driven.

Brandon: But what our experience in a more kind of qualitative environment, of just asking a lot of questions, I think when you get very high up, like in the top, so higher and higher up in the triangle, and the extra 150 Rand in bank fees doesn’t really matter that much, you’ll find very specific behavior associated with things like that.

Brandon: So it’s like, I’ve got, I know people, I’ve spoken to people who literally opened a bank account to get access to a specific airport lounge.

Brandon: They’re two different lounges, and their normal bank got them into the one, but they actually preferred the other lounge.

Amanda: I’m probably guilty.

Brandon: Well, there you go.

Brandon: If it’s only costing you 150 bucks a month, realistically, and you fly a lot, and you know that you can get into the lounge you want, it makes sense.

Brandon: So I think that’s what accounts for it, and it’s why that question that we ask every year, like which of them is your favorite, or which is the most important program to you, becomes a really important metric for us.

Brandon: That’s, you know, as you get the bottom end of the market, the retail, save a bit of money, super important.

Brandon: As you get higher up, it’s very, very specific, often travel related benefits that people are looking for.

Brandon: I think there’s something in there.

Brandon: I think that’s the behavior we’re seeing, yeah.

Amanda: For sure.

Amanda: Definitely.

Amanda: You’ve spoken in the past, you actually spoke about it at our conference, and it was fascinating around the danger of looking at pure transactional data to make business decisions.

Brandon: Yeah.

Amanda: This was actually a highlight of your keynote you gave the audience, because I remember everyone applauded you going, yes, that’s right.

Amanda: Can you share that with us please, because it’s so real.

Brandon: So I think it’s a data tsunami at the moment.

Brandon: The data is unbelievable.

Brandon: The one big retailer was talking about collecting 5,900 consumer data points a second.

Brandon: That’s what’s going on in South Africa.

Brandon: So that’s what these really, especially the big grocery retailer programs.

Brandon: But I think the example I would, my joke is always, you got to be careful about looking at, just looking at numbers and the joke is Marmite, right?

Brandon: So if you just looked at the numbers and you looked at what happened during COVID, you’ll see that for some reason, people just started hating Marmite.

Brandon: And Marmite, for those watching who don’t know, it’s this British, it’s a spread, it’s a yeast-based spread that you put on bread and some people love it and some people hate it.

Amanda: Yeah, I’m a hater.

Brandon: You’re a hater?

Brandon: Oh, I’m a lover.

Brandon: So if you look at the numbers, you’ll go like, what happened to Marmite and COVID?

Brandon: Well, it’s just South Africa lost its appetite for Marmite.

Brandon: They literally went from here to zero.

Brandon: But Marmite is a byproduct of the beer industry and it was one of the product casualties of COVID because not enough beer was being brewed in the UK because the pubs had all shut down.

Brandon: It meant that there was no product, there was no raw product to make Marmite.

Brandon: So the supply company.

Brandon: Now, you don’t have to ask too many questions to find out that that’s the reason why sales dropped in South Africa.

Brandon: But if you don’t apply a lens of rationality or a slightly more analytical lens on things, the raw sales transactional data, and that’s an absurd argument that I just used.

Brandon: I mean, it’s an extreme version.

Brandon: But think about it even on a more simple version would be there must be an enormous number of women out there according to transactional data who are using men’s deodorant.

Brandon: Because if they’re doing the shopping and vice versa, they’re probably a lot of men out there who use an enormous amount of female sanitary goods.

Brandon: It’s like, what’s going on?

Brandon: Well, you need to apply a lens of rationality.

Brandon: I just think that sometimes there are things, you can get very lost in transactional data and miss crucial things.

Brandon: Miss crucial consumer attitudes and perceptions, the convenience in mind.

Brandon: It’s like if all you’re lost in is, well, this is what’s happening there and you never bother to go, yeah, but is there something wrong in that system?

Brandon: Yeah.

Brandon: So that’s the danger I think of.

Brandon: I’m not saying transactional data is not brilliant and amazing, and certainly from a logistical perspective, it’s how extraordinary must it be as somebody who produces products in a big retailer to know the moment when you run out of stock on a shelf.

Brandon: I mean, it’s like, wow, what an incredible system to have set up, and it’s going to service the consumer at the end of the day as well, because if they’re looking for those products, it means you can put them back on shelf more quickly.

Brandon: The transactional data and these programs and everything that results is absolutely amazing, but it does tend to tell you what, and we are very, very obsessed with trying to find out why.

Brandon: The transactional data, sure, you got to be super, super smart to work out the why from transactional data.

Brandon: If you only have one product available on shelf, it’ll just show that it’s the best-selling product.

Brandon: Well, that’s not telling you what I mean.

Brandon: So yeah, you just got to put it in perspective.

Amanda: I’ve said for years actually, since I’ve been in this industry, that transactional data alone, you’ve got to supplement it with the why, and typically research can really, whether it’s immediate digital research or whether it’s longitudinal research, it can really just supplement the what to give you the story.

Amanda: One of our favorite debates, and I’m coming to a close on our interview, but let’s not leave out our favorite debate.

Amanda: In the white paper, you track data that talks about consumers who want that instant reward versus build points for a future reward.

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: Are they looking back or they’re looking forward in terms of their gratification, so to speak.

Amanda: The data shows that 38% of South Africans want the instant reward and 36% want to build.

Amanda: So there’s not a vast difference and 26% like to do both, which is always a bit difficult for brands to deal with because typically the same consumer wants to do both.

Amanda: So give us your views on that because I know you have a very strong view on it.

Brandon: Well, so it’s a very strong view.

Brandon: But it’s a strong human view.

Brandon: In the same way that the world is full of introverts and extroverts, and you don’t know which one you’re dealing with or which one you are half the time, and then you get extroverts and extroverts and extroverts, right?

Brandon: So it’s the same model.

Brandon: You’ve got people on either end and then you have people in the middle.

Brandon: The answer is you just have to be sensitive to the needs of those people and understand that the way you treat them is very, very different.

Brandon: So when we first started trying to unpack this, and I’m glad you remember the numbers exactly, because I actually thought that they would be more discreet.

Brandon: I thought it would be more than 35, 35 in the I want to be rewarded versus instantly versus a lot of people.

Brandon: But it isn’t.

Brandon: It’s this even kind of playing field.

Brandon: It means that you’ve got to do everything.

Brandon: Unfortunately, you’ve got to prioritize both.

Brandon: That’s my strong view.

Brandon: Again, one of the long-time stories I’ve told about it is, the problem with trying to predict that behavior is it’s unpredictable.

Brandon: It’s exactly like the introvert-extrovert thing.

Brandon: You can get two people.

Brandon: I always say my partner and I were the greatest example.

Brandon: When we went shopping for tomatoes, student really care about tomatoes.

Brandon: He would just get in his car and go and buy tomatoes.

Brandon: Then you look at me.

Brandon: We looked similar.

Brandon: We lived similar lifestyles.

Brandon: But I’ll drive into the market to go and get my heirloom tomatoes because I really care about tomatoes.

Brandon: Two people who look almost identical, who’ve got the same profile on your loyalty program, they’re going to, there’s no difference there.

Brandon: They got the same level of income, the same blah, blah.

Brandon: But the one guy or girl is specifically got a mindset that just says, I like it when someone says, you saved 55 around 60 today.

Brandon: And then there’s the other guy who goes, I just want to know how many points I got because I’m building up towards buying a TV.

Brandon: You can’t tell the difference between the two of them.

Brandon: So don’t, don’t try.

Brandon: Treat everybody as if they’re actually that group in the middle, which is only 25 percent.

Brandon: But I say that the programs that focus too heavily on one or the other, the ones who are probably going to fall a little bit behind in the consumer’s mind.

Brandon: I think, I don’t know about your experiences, but I mean mine, everybody I know is different with loyalty.

Brandon: I hate building stuff.

Brandon: So I’m the guy who leaves gift vouchers in my kitchen, stuck on the side of my kitchen cupboard.

Brandon: They never get used.

Brandon: I’m not that guy.

Brandon: I’m not a redemption guy.

Brandon: But I love it when I go and I buy stuff at a garden store down the road and at the tool, someone says, you’ve got 250 rand in credit.

Brandon: You want to apply it now.

Brandon: That suits me.

Brandon: But not everybody.

Brandon: There’s some people who love building.

Brandon: So do both.

Brandon: I mean, that is certainly in South Africa, the rulers do both.

Brandon: It will be really interesting to see some of the studies from major territories in Europe or America.

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: Interestingly, a lot of the translation of what you’ve just described is in the communication.

Amanda: So in your garden center, you may have behind the scenes been building up for that 250 rand off when you shop, but it feels instant because of the way it’s communicated.

Amanda: Whereas if it’s badly communicated and it’s stuck on an app and you’ve got to go down and download your profile and go and find it and they never communicate it to you, it feels like a mission.

Amanda: So it’s not always the nuance exactly as you’ve just said, I’d back up everything you’ve just said, but in the application of it, the nuance isn’t always-

Brandon: I’m with you, yeah.

Amanda: The nuance is in how it’s applied and communicated and engaging with the customer rather than just what the mechanic is.

Brandon: So it’s not too low.

Brandon: I suppose there’s a thought in my head always, the building thing is me doing some work.

Brandon: I’ve actually got to do more work.

Brandon: Whereas the instant gratification, that’s for me, that’s treating me like a really loyal customer.

Brandon: My favorite loyalty moment in my life is as a bar up the road, that is my local pub that I do a lot of meetings at, business meetings, of course.

Brandon: Every time they put a new beer on a draft, when I walk in, they’ll give me a draft and go, hey, what do you think of it?

Brandon: To me, that’s the ultimate loyalty, because I’m not asking for anything I’m not built.

Brandon: It’s, yes, on your theory, the money that I’ve spent there in the last 10 years, I’ve been building up for that free beer.

Amanda: Yeah.

Brandon: But for me, that’s the instant gratification moment that I haven’t overtly built for and that suits me.

Amanda: Yeah.

Amanda: And in that case, you’ve just described as well, it’s surprising delight.

Amanda: It’s unexpected.

Brandon: Absolutely.

Amanda: You have a higher, there’s a higher, like there’s a psychological dopamine hit from it, like great free beer, like it could be anything else.

Brandon: I don’t know.

Amanda: OK.

Amanda: Well, Brandon, we could talk forever because we typically do, the two of us talk about this data forever to get the right stories out for the markets.

Amanda: But is there anything else you want to leave us with before we draw the interview to a close?

Brandon: Sure.

Brandon: You started off by saying what I think about the landscape and that whole discussion about where does it go next.

Brandon: What I’m looking forward to this year with getting the data out, I’ve got a little spoiler for you about one of the angles that I’m trying to take on it.

Brandon: I spoke a bit about that promiscuity thing, and there’s a greater cause that underpins it, which is what I think we’re getting into this weird space of consumer or retail ubiquity.

Brandon: It feels like South Africa is a market where, in the same way that the loyalty programs are all joining together to be like these big master programs, finding out who’s doing what in South Africa right now is really hard.

Brandon: The pharmacies are starting to sell groceries, the grocery stores are trying to sell fridges and air fryers.

Brandon: It feels like everywhere you go, it’s just this big, amorphous everything.

Brandon: I do still think that loyalty, the concept of loyalty, of knowing who I am and finding out how you can differentiate yourself in this really vanilla landscape.

Brandon: I think that’s the key possibly for the immediate future.

Brandon: I’m hoping that somewhere in the data this year, I’ll be able to try and pull some of those stories out.

Brandon: Who and how and where are these brands, managing to still use loyalty to differentiate themselves?

Brandon: Because sure, it’s getting hard as a consumer.

Brandon: I think with 10 cards in my wallet, I’m not even sure which loyalty program I’m using half the time.

Brandon: It’s tough out there.

Brandon: Differentiation of brand and a product and a service has to still be key to a little competitive advantage.

Brandon: I think that’s my dominant thought at the moment about loyalty.

Amanda: Stunning.

Amanda: Well, let’s see what we can pull out for the 2025-6 South Africa Loyalty White Paper.

Amanda: Brandon, thank you for your time.

Amanda: Thank you for sharing your insights.

Amanda: You really are a director of storytelling.

Amanda: I could listen to you tell stories like this all day.

Amanda: Thank you.

Brandon: Thanks, Amanda.

Brandon: Thanks for having me.

Paula: This show is sponsored by Wise Marketeer Group, publisher of The Wise Marketeer, the premier digital customer loyalty marketing resource for industry relevant news, insights and research.

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